Tips, advice, and blogs by our Typepad community.

Spring is here! If you enjoyed our check list for tidying up your sidebars, we invite you to take a look at your blog's inner-workings. From the Dashboard, click on Settings under Manage My Blogs. There's something to check in each section but it won't take much time.

On the Basics page, make sure your Blog Description is up-to-date, especially if it shows on the blog itself.

If you have a Welcome Message, check to make sure that's up-to-date as well. This will be the first thing new readers see when they visit your blog!

If your blog is publicized, you'll want to make sure you've also enabled the Google Sitemap option.

Check that your Meta Keywords and Description are relevant and specific, spelled properly, and truly descriptive. You may want to check out some resources on best practices for tips on how to choose the right description, as well as information on how search engines actually use that content.

Your Sharing settings are super important if you're active on social media. Facebook and/or Twitter might be the main sources your readers look to for updates from your blog. Make sure you have those accounts connected and ready for sharing.

The Feeds page has everything related to the RSS feeds for your blog. We've added some newer options there for Category and Author feeds, so make sure you check those settings.

If you'd like more detailed information about your visitors, you can connect your blog to Google's Analyticsservice.

There are also options for using TypeKit for web fonts and using the bitly link shortening and tracking service.

You probably haven't taken a look at the Post settings page in quite some time. Check the settings there to make sure they suit your blog.

There's a newer feature at the bottom to automatically show Auto-Generated Excerpts from the posts on the main index and archive pages. This can improve your blog's load time substantially.

Categories are a great way to organize your blog's posts by topic. However, too many categories can be counter-productive. We recommend taking some time to go through the Categories and Blogs > Posts listing to see if any categories can be merged or eliminated.

For most blogs, the default Comments settings will work wonderfully. We recommend taking a look at the different options to determine which will best suit your blog's needs.

Have you been taking time to spring clean your blog? Share your tips in the comments and we might include those in an upcoming post!

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